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General Planar Quadrilateral Mesh Design Using Conjugate Direction Field
Yang Liu∗ Weiwei Xu∗ Jun Wang† Lifeng Zhu‡ Baining Guo∗ Falai Chen† Guoping Wang‡
Microsoft Research Asia † University of Science and Technology of China ‡ Peking University
∗
Figure 1: Left: An airport terminal model with planar quad faces generated by our conjugate direction field method. The maximum value
of the planarity measure (the angular difference in degrees between the sum of four internal angles of a quad face and 360◦ ) is 0.05◦ . Right:
A comparison of the planar quad mesh on the roof of this model from the principal curvature network (top) and our method (bottom). Our
method allows us to control the layout of the planar quad mesh and reduces the number of singularities (non-four-valence vertices).
Abstract
1
We present a novel method to approximate a freeform shape with
a planar quadrilateral (PQ) mesh for modeling architectural glass
structures. Our method is based on the study of conjugate direction
fields (CDF) which allow the presence of ±k/4(k ∈ Z) singularities. Starting with a triangle discretization of a freeform shape,
we first compute an as smooth as possible conjugate direction field
satisfying the user’s directional and angular constraints, then apply mixed-integer quadrangulation and planarization techniques to
generate a PQ mesh which approximates the input shape faithfully.
We demonstrate that our method is effective and robust on various
3D models.
Planar quadrilateral (PQ) meshes are essential in architectural geometry for discretizing a freeform architectural structure with planar quad faces [Glymph et al. 2004; Liu et al. 2006; Pottmann
et al. 2007b], and the study of PQ meshes is now an important
topic of discrete differential geometry [Pottmann and Wallner 2008;
Bobenko and Suris 2008]. Its continuous counterpart, in differential geometry, is the conjugate curve network [Sauer 1970; Liu et al.
2006; Bobenko and Suris 2008], which is defined to be two families of one-parameter curves that cover a smooth surface, and their
tangent vectors v, w at an arbitrary point x on a surface are conjugate (see its formal definition in Section 3). These two families
of tangent directions v, w form a general cross field without the
requirement of orthogonality, which we call a conjugate direction
field (CDF) hereafter. The layout of a PQ mesh can be controlled
through the design of the CDF.
CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—Geometric algorithms, languages,
and systems;
Keywords: planar quadrilateral mesh, conjugate direction field,
architectural geometry
Links:
DL
PDF
Introduction
It has been recognized that an intuitive design tool for smooth
CDFs is desirable for architects to control the layout of the PQ
mesh [Pottmann et al. 2007a; Eigensatz et al. 2010]. Unfortunately,
there is no general solution currently available for CDF design. Existing techniques can handle two special cases. Principal directions,
as a typical example of CDFs, have been used in [Liu et al. 2006]
to produce PQ meshes. Since the principal directions are unique,
there are no degrees of freedom left for the architects. A recent
representation-vector based CDF design technique in [Zadravec
et al. 2010] is capable of producing a smooth CDF via measuring
the smoothness of the representation vector field. However, only
singularities with indices of ±k/2(k ∈ Z) can be modeled and it
fails in handling ±k/4(k ∈ Z) singularities, such as a surface with
convex corners (e.g., a round cube).
The main challenge of general CDF design is how to define a
correct smoothness measure for a CDF so that singularities of
±k/4(k ∈ Z) are allowed. Since a CDF on two adjacent faces
consists of two pairs of directional vectors, its smoothness can only
be measured after the vector association issue is resolved. That is,
we need to figure out which vector is associated with which vector between the neighboring conjugate directions. The existing approach in [Zadravec et al. 2010] implies an order in two conjugate
directions and thus prohibits the arbitrary association of vectors.
Furthermore, note that a CDF is not a rotational symmetry (RoSy)
field since the angle between any pair of conjugate directions varies
across the surface. The vector association techniques for the RoSy
field, such as the period jump technique in [Ray et al. 2008] and the
trivial connection in [Crane et al. 2010], cannot be directly applied.
The main contribution of this paper is to propose a general CDF
design scheme that enables the user to fully explore the degrees of
freedom in a CDF. The key observation is that a CDF is exactly
smooth only when the vector association between neighboring conjugate directions can be modeled by a signed-permutation operation. Since the membership of direction vectors in a CDF are not
differentiated in this operation, arbitrary types of vector associations can be modeled to allow the appearance of ±k/4 singularities. We show that the signed-permutation condition for a smooth
CDF can be converted into a proper smoothness measure which can
be computed explicitly. Similar to the RoSy field smoothing objective function in [Ray et al. 2009], our smoothness measure is only a
summation of trigonometric functions. This significantly facilitates
the direction field optimization to seek an as smooth as possible
CDF on the surface. A side benefit of our measure is that it allows
the direct control of the angle between conjugate directions to avoid
self-conjugate directions (a direction that is conjugate to itself).
After the design of CDF, we adapt the global parametrization technique in [Bommes et al. 2009] to trace the iso-lines following the
conjugate directions, and then extract an initial quad mesh through
the intersections of the iso-lines. A perturbation algorithm is then
applied to optimize the quad mesh into a PQ mesh. Figure 1 illustrates an example from our method.
We have evaluated our method on a variety of models, including
architectural models with highly-varied curvature distributions and
3D freeform models, such as the Stanford Bunny. Experimental
results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method
in generating high-quality PQ meshes.
2
Related Work
N -RoSy Field represents N coupled directions which are invariant under rotations of an integer multiple of 2π
. Therefore, the
N
N -RoSy field design algorithm should be able to handle the vector association issue to model fractional singularities. Hertzmann
and Zorin [2000] adopted an angle formulation to formulate the
smoothness energy of a cross field. Vector association is achieved
using integer variables, which are eliminated through the trigonometric function in the nonlinear optimization procedure.
Ray et al. [2008] proposed a period-jump based discretization of a
4-RoSy field on a surface, where the period-jump is an integer variable encoded at an edge for the vector association. Their method
built a linear system to solve for a globally smooth 4-RoSy field.
However, the direct rounding scheme in their method might lead to
undesirable singularities in the resulting field. To solve this problem, a geometry-aware method [Ray et al. 2009] was developed
to control the topology of an N -RoSy field by integrating the filtered defect angles into a smoothness energy function. Bommes
et al. [2009] proposed a mixed-integer solver for the design of an
N -RoSy field. Instead of direct rounding, their method iteratively
rounds the integer variables to further reduce the smoothness energy and the number of singularities. In contrast, Palacios and
Zhang [2007] used representation vectors to control the singularity
of the N -RoSy field. They also provided an intuitive interface for
design and editing. Recently, an elegant method based on the trivial connection [Crane et al. 2010] simplified the design of a smooth
N -RoSy field by solving a linear system only.
Our algorithm is inspired by the N -RoSy field design algorithm.
However, we adopt the signed-permutation technique to handle the
varying angles between the conjugate directions.
Quadrangulation is to compute a quadrilateral structure on a surface and it is well studied in the mesh generation community.
With an augmented vector/cross field on a surface, curve tracing or
global parameterization methods are developed to generate a quad
mesh [Alliez et al. 2003; Boier-Martin et al. 2004; Tong et al. 2006;
Ray et al. 2006; Kälberer et al. 2007; Bommes et al. 2009]. The
Morse-Smale complex of a scalar function, as another approach,
can generate a global quadrilateral structure and automatically optimize the distribution of singularities [Dong et al. 2006; Huang et al.
2008]. In this paper, we adapt the mixed integer quadrangulation
method [Bommes et al. 2009] to guarantee the global topological
structure and produce all-quad meshes.
PQ mesh is preferable for the purpose of fabrication in architecture [Glymph et al. 2004], especially for glass structures. Liu et
al. [2006] extracted quad meshes from the principal curvature lines
and developed a PQ perturbation algorithm to enforce planarity of
quad faces. Recently Zadravec et al. [2010] cast the design of the
conjugate curve network into a vector field design problem, and the
conjugate directions are computed after the optimization of a vector field. However, as mentioned in Section 1, their algorithm has
a limitation in modeling singularities of the index ±k/4(k ∈ Z).
In addition, the angle between conjugate directions cannot be controlled directly. In comparison, our method completely solves the
vector association issue in a CDF so that singularities of ±k/4 can
be well handled. Our algorithm also enforces the explicit constraint
on the angle between two conjugate directions to avoid the appearance of self-conjugacy.
3
CDF On Triangle Meshes
It is well known that, on a smooth surface S ⊂ R3 , two tangent vectors vp , wp in the tangential space Tp (S) at the point
p ∈ S are conjugate if and only if the bilinear form IIp (vp , wp ) =
0 [Do Carmo 1976], where IIp is the second fundamental form at
p. If vp and wp are treated as two vectors in R3 , the preceding
equality can be written in the following form:
κp,1 (vp · ep,1 )(wp · ep,1 ) + κp,2 (vp · ep,2 )(wp · ep,2 ) = 0 (1)
where κp,1 , κp,2 are the principal curvatures at p, and ep,1 , ep,2 are
the corresponding principal directions.
Following the direction field discretization method in [Ray et al.
2009], we define a CDF on a triangular mesh to be two families
of tangent direction fields {v, w} sampled at each triangle f , and
they are conjugate to each other, i.e., Eqn. 1 holds at each triangle
f . In the following, we first introduce the notations for a CDF, and
then describe how to define its signed-permutation-based smoothness and singularity index, which are critical to the design of a CDF.
As shown in the right inset, a
fi
CDF on a triangle fi is four
wi
vi
vectors {vi , wi , −vi , −wi }, and
αi
they can be parameterized by two
θi
scalar parameters {θi , αi }, where
ei,1
−vi
−wi
θi is the oriented angle between
ei,1 and vi , and αi is the oriented angle between vi and
wi . Therefore, we have vi = hcos θi , sin θi iT and wi =
hcos(θi + αi ), sin(θi + αi )iT .
wj
wj
wi
vi
wi
vi
vj
fi fj
vj
vj
wi
fi
(a)
where Cij
wj
vi
fj
fi
(b)
fj
(c)
=
sin(θi − θj + αi − rij )
sin(θj − θi + rij )
sin(θi − θj + αi − αj − rij )
sin(θj − θi + αj + rij )
When the magnitude of C1 (eij ) or C2 (eij ) is large, the computed
Pij from the above equations can be far from a signed-permutation
matrix. Figure 2c illustrates an example of a non-smooth CDF on
fi and fj .
Figure 2: (a-b) Two cases of vector associations in a smooth
CDF
0
1
and the corresponding signed-permutation matrices:
−1
0
−1
0
and
. (c) An example of a pair of non-smooth conju0
−1
gate directions.
Motivated by the above observation, we resort to a signedpermutation matrix approach to define the smoothness of a CDF
directly. The smoothness measure of a CDF is then based on the
computation of the deviation from Pij to the signed permutation
matrix group. It can be described by the following proposition:
3.1
Proposition 1 Pij is a signed-permutation matrix iff the following
C1 (eij )+C2 (eij )
T
two conditions hold: P−1
= 0.
ij = Pij and
2
The Smoothness of a CDF
Similar to the N -RoSy field [Ray et al. 2008], the smoothness of a
CDF is also computed at each edge eij incident to two triangles fi
and fj . In fact, we compute the angle difference between the associated direction vectors, which is formally called a discrete connection in [Crane et al. 2010], at each edge eij to measure the change
of the conjugate directions. Due to the fact that there are two directions on a face and the angle between them varies across the mesh,
we treat a CDF as two coupled 2-RoSy fields on the mesh to measure its smoothness. Consequently, two angle differences C1 (eij )
and C2 (eij ) need to be computed at edge eij :
C1 (eij )
C2 (eij )
=
=
(θj + qαj ) + rij − θi + p1 π;
(θj + (1 − q)αj ) + rij − (θi + αi ) + p2 π
(2)
where rij is the rotation angle between two local reference frames
ei,1 on fi and ej,1 on fj . q ∈ {0, 1} is used to choose vj or wj
at fj for associating vectors, and p1 and p2 are integers serving as
the period jumps in the N-RoSy field design [Ray et al. 2008]. Note
that q plays an important role here in modeling the associations of
vectors.
Smoothness Measure. To produce a smooth CDF, an ideal algorithm needs to minimize the magnitudes of C1 (eij ) and C2 (eij )
simultaneously. However, note that this formulation builds a nonlinear relationship between the (0, 1)-integer variable q and the
floating-point variable αj , so it dramatically increases the complexity for further optimization. As a result, it is very difficult
to design an efficient algorithm to minimize this nonlinear mixedinteger optimization problem. Neither the mixed-integer technique
employed in [Bommes et al. 2009] nor the trivial connection technique in [Crane et al. 2010] can be used to solve this problem.
However, note that when both C1 (eij ), C2 (eij ) vanish, i.e., the
CDF is perfectly smooth, the corresponding directions on two adjacent faces can be permuted to each other, i.e., we have
e j) .
(vi |wi ) Pij = (e
vj |w
Here Pij is a 2 × 2 signed-permutation matrix, i.e., Pij is a
0, 1, −1-matrix with one nonzero entry in each row and each cole j ) are the representations of (vj , wj ) in the local
umn. (e
vj , w
reference frames at fi by using a hinge map as a local isometej = hcos(θj + rij ), sin(θj + rij )iT
ric parametrization, i.e., v
e j = hcos(θj + αj + rij ), sin(θj + αj + rij )iT . Figure 2a
and w
and 2b illustrate two cases of vector association in a smooth CDF
and their corresponding Pij s.
From Eqn. 3.1, Pij can be estimated from the CDF using the following formula:
e j) =
Pij = (vi |wi )−1 (e
v j |w
1
Cij
sin αi
Proof. The first condition is due to the fact that any signed permutation matrix is an orthogonal matrix. It can be re-organized into:
e j ) (e
e j )T = 0.
Dij := (vi |wi ) (vi |wi )T − (e
v j |w
vj |w
The second condition comes from the fact that both C1 (eij ) and
C2 (eij ) vanish when Pij is a signed-permutation matrix. By substituting Eqn. 2 into this condition and multiplying it by 4, we have
α
4(θi + α2i ) = 4(θj + 2j ) + 4rij + 2(p1 + p2 )π. To eliminate the
two integers p1 and p2 , we take the cosine and sine on both sides
and get the following formula:
cos(4θi + 2αi ) − cos(4θj + 2αj + 4rij )
Eij :=
= 0.
sin(4θi + 2αi ) − sin(4θj + 2αj + 4rij )
From the above derivation, it is obvious that Dij = 0 and Eij = 0
are necessary conditions when Pij is a signed-permutation matrix.
We only need to prove that they are also sufficient conditions. From
Eij = 0, we have:
θj + rij = θi +
kπ
αi − αj
+
, k ∈ Z.
2
2
(3)
By substituting Eqn. 3 into Dij = 0, we can derive that cos αi =
(−1)k cos αj . Therefore, if k is even, then αj = αi + 2lπ, l ∈ Z.
We have:
θj + rij = θi + ( k2 − l)π
, l ∈ Z.
θj + αj + rij = θi + αi + ( k2 + l)π
If k is odd, then αj = (2l + 1)π − αi , l ∈ Z, and we have:
θj + rij = θi + αi + ( k−1
− l)π
2
, l ∈ Z.
+ l)π
θj + αj + rij = θi + ( k+1
2
It is easy to verify that {vi , wi } can be signed-permuted to
e j }. Therefore Pij is a signed permutation matrix. {e
vj , w
Having got the equivalent conditions for Pij to be a signed permutation matrix, we define the smoothness of a CDF Sij at edge eij
as follows:
Sij :=kDij k2F + kEij k22 = 4 + cos(2αi ) + cos(2αj )−
cos(2(θi + αi − θj − rij )) − cos(2(θj + αj − θi + rij ))−
cos(2(θj − θi + rij )) − cos(2(θj + αj + rij − θi − αi ))−
αi
αj
2 cos(4(θi +
− θj −
− rij )),
(4)
2
2
where k · kF is the Frobenius norm.
Remark: If αi and αj are π2 , we have Sij = kEij k22 = 2 −
2 cos(4θ1 − 4θ2 − 4rij ) which is the smoothness measure of a
cross field used in [Hertzmann and Zorin 2000; Ray et al. 2009].
.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 3: CDF design on an airport terminal model. (a) The original model. (b) An initial CDF from user-specified strokes (red lines). (c)
The optimized CDF. (d) The resulting PQ mesh.
3.2
Index of Singularity
The index of singularity is a fundamental concept introduced by
Poincaré and Hopf to identify the singularities of a vector/direction
field. For a CDF, we define the index of a CDF at a vertex u as
Kd (u) +
I(u) =
P
eij ∈N (u)
C1 (eij ) + C2 (eij )
2
2π
(5)
where Kd (u) denotes the angle defect of u (i.e., 2π minus the summation of angles adjacent to u), and N (u) denotes the edges incident to u and the average of C1 (eij ) and C2 (eij ) measures the
difference between two pairs of conjugate directions on two neighboring faces at edge eij .
C (e
)+C (e
)
Actually 1 ij 2 2 ij is exactly the angle difference at eij of a
4-RoSy field B where its member direction vectors are the bisectors of vi and wi . Our observation is from the following simple
calculation:
C1 (eij ) + C2 (eij )
αj
αi (p1 + p2 )π
= θj +
+ rij − θi +
+
.
2
2
2
2
(6)
This fact indicates that the computation of the index of a singularity
in a CDF can be performed in its adjoint 4-RoSy field B.
4
CDF Optimization
With the definition of smoothness and index, we are ready to develop a CDF optimization algorithm. Given a triangular mesh and
user-specified directional constraints on a subset of faces, our direction field optimization algorithm seeks an as smooth as possible
CDF satisfying these constraints. The overall workflow of CDF
optimization is illustrated in Figure 3.
In the direction field optimization, we seek for optimal θi , αi at
each triangle by minimizing the smoothness energy under the conjugacy constraints, angular constraints, and directional constraints.
Smoothness energy function is used to measure the smoothness of
the CDF. It is a summation of Sij defined in Eqn. 4 over each edge:
Es =
X
Sij .
(7)
eij
Conjugacy constraint. The conjugacy at each face can be measured through Eqn. 1. Since we set the local reference frame to be
the principal curvature directions, the conjugacy constraint on fi is:
Cfi = κi,1 cos(θi ) cos(θi + αi ) + κi,2 sin(θi ) sin(θi + αi ) = 0.
We adopt the normal cycle technique in [Cohen-Steiner and Morvan 2003] to compute the principal curvatures κi,1 , κi,2 and principal directions at face fi . Curvature tensors are first estimated at vertices, and then smoothed to filter out the discretization noise [Alliez
et al. 2003]. The curvature tensor at fi is approximated by averaging the curvature tensors at its vertices.
In our optimization, we introduce an inequality conjugacy constraint at each face:
−c c ≤ Ci ≤ c c
(8)
where c = maxi (|κi,1 |, |κi,2 |), and c is a small value (default:
0.001) to control how well the conjugacy condition should be satisfied. Our inequality formulation of the conjugacy constraint avoids
numerical instability due to unreliable curvature tensor estimation
at noisy areas.
Directional constraint. Control of the local orientation of the CDF
is critical in our algorithm. We provide a stroke-based interface
for the user to specify the directional constraints on the mesh. We
support this constraint by introducing the following inequality constraint:
αd ≤ ψic − θic ≤ αd
where ic denotes the face which contains the directional constraint,
ψic is the angle between user-specified directions and local reference vectors on fic , and αd is a user-supplied angle to control the
angular difference between the conjugate directions and the user’s
input (default: 10◦ ).
Angular constraint. Small angles between two conjugate directions need to be avoided to guarantee the quality of the resulting
PQ mesh. We thus set the angular constraint at each face to be:
αs ≤ αi ≤ π − αs .
Here αs is the minimal angle defined by the user (default: 15◦ ). The
angular constraint is not added to faces with directional constraints
due to the possible conflict.
Initialization. Since we are dealing with a nonlinear optimization
problem, an properly initialized CDF has to be determined to start
the optimization. Our initialization procedure is to mimic parallel
transport operation to propagate the conjugate directions at constrained faces to the whole mesh. However, since conjugate directions are not unique at each face, we choose to first generate
a smooth bisector direction field B which is 4-RoSy, then use the
curvature information to compute a pair of conjugate directions on
each face. The initialization procedure is as follows:
1. Compute conjugate directions for each face fic with a directional constraint by solving Eqn. 1 where vi or wi is
set by this direction. Set the bisector direction at fic to
v
+w
bic = kviic +wiic k , and denote the oriented angle between bic
c
c
and eic ,1 by φic . Push these faces with directional constraints
into a queue Q and label them visited. For other faces without
directional constraints, label them unvisited.
2. Generate a 4-RoSy field by a FIFO propagation. Pop a face
fi from Q. For each of its neighboring faces fj , push it into
the queue if fj is unvisited. Label fj visited, and set φj to
minimize |(φi − (φj + rij )) + k π2 | (k is an integer value).
This push/pop procedure iterates until Q is empty.
3. Compute conjugate directions for each unconstrained face fi .
Two parameters, θi and αi , can be found through the solutions
of two equations, θi + α2i = φi and Cfi = 0. Note that
the solution may not exist in the negative Gaussian curvature
region. In this case, we simply assign θi = 0, αi = π2 .
Figure 3 demonstrates an example of the initialization of a CDF.
An alternative way is to use the mixed-integer technique [Bommes
et al. 2009] to generate a smooth B with less singularities. However, our approach is lightweight and fast to compute. It is enough
to produce good initial CDFs for further optimization in our experiments.
Optimization. The smooth energy function and the inequality constraints form a nonlinear constrained optimization problem. Since
the number of variables and constraints can be very large (proportional to the number of faces), we use an augmented Lagrangian
method to solve it efficiently.
The augmented Lagrangian method converts a nonlinear constrained problem {min f (x), s.t. ci (x) = 0, i = 1, . . . , r; ci (x) ≥
0, i = r + 1, . . . , n} to an unconstrained problem:
min ϕ(x, λ, σ) = f (x) − λT d(x) +
1
σd(x)T d(x)
2
where
di (x) =
ci (x)
λi
σ
if
i ≤ r or ci (x) ≤
otherwise.
λi
;
σ
λ is the Lagrangian multiplier associated with each constraint and
σ is the penalty parameter. They are iteratively updated to tighten
the tolerances of the constraint error [Nocedal and Wright 1999]. At
each iteration, the limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS) algorithm [Liu
and Nocedal 1989] is adopted to solve the unconstrained optimization problem in our implementation.
Singularity editing. With the index formula defined in Eqn. 5,
we are able to detect all the singularities of a CDF via its bisector directional field B. However, our smoothness function does
not penalize the number of singularities directly and the distribution of singularity points may be unsatisfactory. To tackle this,
we follow the geometry-aware approach proposed in [Ray et al.
2009] to manipulate singularities of B, i.e., allow the user to select
and edit the singular vertices by move, merge and cancel operations. Recalling that B is a 4-RoSy field (see Eqn. 6), we denote
C (e )+C (e )
B(eij ) = 1 ij 2 2 ij as the angle difference of B defined on
edge eij . Now we sketch the editing steps as follows; please refer
to [Ray et al. 2009] for more details:
1. Apply a Gaussian filter to obtain the smoothed angle defects
K corr on vertices.
2. Modify K corr according to the editing of singularities: move a
singularity of index I from a vertex u1 to a vertex u2 by adding
2πI to K corr (u1 ) and subtracting 2πI from K corr (u2 ). The
merging and canceling operations can be achieved by the moving operation.
Figure 4: Singularity editing. Left: a CDF with 6 singularities. The
blue ball indicates a 1/4 singularity, and the yellow ball indicates
a −1/4 singularity. Right: the editing result. Two singularities in
the central region are canceled, and the singularity at the top-left is
moved away from others.
P
3. Recompute B(eij ) by minimizing eij B(eij )2 under the conP
straints eij ∈N (u) B(eij ) = K corr (u) − Kd (u) defined at
each vertex u.
0
4. Modify the rotation angle rij on each edge by letting rij be rij
−
0
B(eij ), and then optimize the smoothness of CDF. Here rij is
the unmodified rotation angle.
Figure 4 shows an editing result.
5
PQ Mesh Generation
The goal of PQ mesh generation is to find a PQ mesh following the
optimized CDF. We first adapt the global parametrization method
in [Dong et al. 2006; Bommes et al. 2009] to generate an initial
quad mesh, and then improve its quality by planarization.
5.1
Global Parametrization
In the global parametrization, we assign an (s, t) parameter value
to each vertex of the input mesh so that its iso-parameter lines on
the surface are locally oriented according to the optimized CDF.
Specifically, we minimize the following energy function to seek for
the optimal (s, t) parameter values:
"
2 2 #
X
∇si
∇ti
T
T
Ep =
area(fi )
· vi
+
· wi
k∇si k
k∇ti k
fi
(9)
where (viT , wiT ) = rot90 (vi , wi ) (rot90 means rotation counterclockwise by 90 degrees). Note that we introduce a normalization
operator into the objective function to convert the gradient field of
(s, t) into a direction field, which is different from the parametrization energy function in the mixed integer technique [Bommes et al.
2009]. This means that our formulation focuses on the orientation
alignment and does not care about the length mismatch. It can lead
to better alignment between the parameter lines and the optimized
CDF. The advantage of the formulation in Eqn. 9 is illustrated in
Fig. 5.
However, Eqn. 9 is a nonlinear energy function with many integer
variables introduced at the topology cut and singularities [Bommes
et al. 2009]. We thus design a nonlinear mixed integer solver to
solve it. The solver performs three steps to minimize the energy
function until convergence: (a) optimize the function with the LBFGS method; (b) round an integer variable to its nearest integer
and set this variable as a constant; goto (a) until all the integer variables are fixed; (c) optimize the function until the L-BFGS method
converges.
The number of integer variables can significantly influence the
speed of the solver. We observe that the topology cut can be seg-
Figure 5: A zoom-in view of the airport model (parameterized lines
are in black). Left: the mixed technique approach; right: our approach. The parameter lines generated by our approach aligns to
the CDF better due to nonlinear optimization.
mented into polylines whose end points are located at the singularities, the branching points of the cut or some boundary vertices.
If the edges of each polyline share the same type of signed permutation, their integer translational variables should be the same.
Utilizing these observations, we can introduce only one pair of integer translational variables on each segment to reduce the number
of integer variables dramatically. For instance, the number of integer variables in the optimization of the airport model (Fig. 3) is
reduced from 366 to 64.
5.2
Figure 6: Models with the user-specified strokes overlaid in red.
Left: a tower. Top middle: a roof. Bottom middle: a snail-shell.
Top right: the Stanford Bunny. Bottom right: a Costa surface.
δhist
Planarity Optimization
ζ = 0.003
Similar to the PQ perturbation algorithm in [Liu et al. 2006;
Zadravec et al. 2010], our planarity optimization is formulated as a
nonlinear constrained optimization problem and solved by the augmented Lagrangian method.
Ef
subject to:
wf air Ef air + w2nd E2nd + wdist Edist
φ1ij + φ2ij + φ3ij + φ4ij = 2π;
(10)
where the objective function Ef includes two fairness terms, Ef air
and E2nd , and a distance term Edist to keep the optimized mesh
close to the original mesh. They can be represented by:
P
kδi,j,1 k2 + kδi,j,2 k2
Ef air =
i,j
P
0
0
kδi,j,1 − δi,j,1
k2 + kδi,j,2 − δi,j,2
k2
E2nd =
Pi,j
0
2
Edist =
i,j kvi,j − vi,j k
0.05◦
ζ = 0.002
η = 0.020
=
where vi,j and v0i,j denote the position of the optimized vertex and
the original vertex on the quad mesh. For the non-singular vertex
vi,j , δi,j,1 = vi+1,j +vi−1,j −2vi,j , δi,j,2 = vi,j+1 +vi,j−1 −2vi,j ,
0
0
are the original values of δi,j,1 and δi,j,2 before
and δi,j,1
, δi,j,2
optimization. For the singular vertex, δ is the Laplacian operation
defined by its one ring neighborhood. The equality constraint ensures the sum of four internal angles, φ1ij , ..., φ4ij , to be 2π for each
quad Qij in a mesh. This constraint enforces the optimized Qij to
be planar and convex.
6
0◦
η = 0.013
Experimental Results and Comparisons
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our CDF optimization algorithm through a variety of architectural models and complex 3D
models like the Stanford Bunny (see Figure 6 for models and the
user’s strokes), and the statistics and timings are reported in Table 1. The quality of planarity is measured by two criterions: (a)
δ is the maximum angle difference in degrees between the sum of
four internal angles of a quad and 2π. δ is irrelevant to the size of
quads and is zero when all the quads are planar and convex. (b) η is
the maximum distance between diagonals of the quad face divided
by the mean length of diagonals of the quad mesh. η reflects how
much the glass panel should be bent and is more relevant to architectural applications. The approximation quality ζ of the generated
δhist
δhist
0◦
0◦
0.05◦
0.01◦
ζ = 0.001
η = 0.007
Figure 7: PQ meshes of architectural models. Strokes are shown in
Figure 6. The top of the tower model is zoomed to show singularity
nodes of valence 3. The histogram measures the distribution of face
planarity.
PQ mesh to the original shape is measured by the average distance
from vertices on the PQ mesh to the original model normalized by
the diagonal length of the bounding box of the model.
Our algorithm can efficiently generate a smooth CDF for models
with a highly varied distribution of curvatures. Figure 3 illustrates a design result of an airport terminal model. Its roof is a
wavy surface with transition areas from the positive Gaussian curvature to the negative Gaussian curvature. With the user-specified
strokes (shown in Figure 3b), our algorithm successfully generates
a smooth CDF, and the resulting PQ mesh is shown in Figure 3d. A
comparison of PQ meshes on the roof between the principal direction field and our CDF is illustrated in Figure 1. Due to the complex
distribution of curvatures, the principal direction field leads to an
uneven distribution of quads and more singularities (111 in total)
than our method (24 in total).
Figure 7 demonstrates more CDF design results for architectural
models. For these models, only simple strokes (shown in Figure 6)
are required to guide the generation of smooth CDFs. This further
Model
Airport
Tower
Costa
Roof
Shell
Bunny
#T ri/Quad
7214/2968
6751/1447
12202/2825
10979/3536
1653/635
28576/6920
δ
0.05 ◦
0.05 ◦
0.01 ◦
0.05 ◦
0.01 ◦
0.08 ◦
η
0.023
0.013
0.012
0.020
0.007
0.023
ζ
0.002
0.003
0.005
0.002
0.001
0.004
tcdf
2.9
2.7
4.8
4.4
0.6
11.2
tp
12.5
1.7
34.2
19
0.31
109.6
tP Q
10
3.7
11
9
2
25
Table 1: Statistics and Timings. Timings are measured in seconds
on a 2.66GHz Intel Quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM (our implementation utilizes multicores to parallelize the computation). From
left to right: number of triangles and quads in the PQ mesh, face
planarity δ, normalized diagonal distance η, perturbation distance
ζ, the optimization time for a smooth CDF, the parametrization time
and planarization time. The parametrization time varies with the
number of triangles and singularities.
δhist
0◦
η = 0
η = 0.06
δ = 0◦
δ = 1.55◦
Figure 9: Two curve networks on a cylinder model. Left: a conjugate curve network. Right: a 4-RoSy curve network. Note the
quads from the conjugate curve network are exactly planar. Two
curve networks are generated by setting the parameter γ to be π/4.
360 faces
δhist
0.01◦
0◦
0.08◦
η = 0.017
δ = 0.005◦
(a)
η = 0
◦
δ = 10−14
(b)
392 faces
ζ = 0.005
(a)
η = 0.012
(c)
5707 faces
ζ = 0.004
(b)
η = 0.023
Figure 8: (a) The resulting PQ mesh of the Costa model. Note that
our algorithm can generate a boundary conforming PQ mesh. (b)
The PQ mesh of the Stanford Bunny.
shows the efficiency of our CDF optimization algorithm. The PQ
mesh for the tower model contains vertices of valence 3, which corresponds to 1/4 singularities in the CDF. This cannot be modeled in
the representation vector based approach of [Zadravec et al. 2010].
Two more complicated results are shown in Figure 8. Figure 8a
illustrates a PQ mesh for the Costa model with genus 6. The result shows that our algorithm can handle models of high genus.
Moreover, by specifying strokes at the boundary and employing the
similar feature-line-alignment technique in [Bommes et al. 2009],
a boundary-conforming PQ mesh is obtained.
The Bunny model shown in Figure 6 is a challenging case for PQ
mesh generation since the curvature tensor estimation is not faithful
in some noisy regions. In this case, we relax the conjugacy condition by specifying c = 0.1 in the inequality constraint (Eqn. 8),
and a pleasant PQ mesh is produced then (see Figure 8b).
The superiority of the conjugate curve network
over other curve networks in quad planarity has been proven in
[Sauer 1970][Bobenko and Tsarev 2007, pp 10-11]. We briefly
review their conclusion: taking four points A = f (u0 , v0 ), B =
f (u0 + , v0 ), C = f (u0 , v0 + ), D = f (u0 + , v0 + ) from a
smooth surface f (u, v), the Euclidean distance d(D, πABC ) from
D to the plane spanned by A, B, C is O(4 ) if and only if the u, vcurvilinear net is a conjugate net. If the conjugacy does not hold,
d(D, πABC ) is O(3 ).
Comparisons
Fig. 9 illustrates this superiority using a simple cylinder model with
radius 1. On the left of Fig. 9, we show the parameter lines of
a parametrization: fγ (u, v) = (cos v, sin v, u cos γ + v sin γ),
where γ is a parameter to control the angle between (u, v) param-
η = 0.03
δ = 0.736◦
ζ = 0.01
δ = 0.106◦
η = 0.002
δ = 0.010◦
(d)
(e)
(f)
Figure 10: Comparison between CDF and 4-RoSy field in the PQ
mesh generation of a half ellipsoid. (a) a red stroke which specifies
the directional constraint. (b&c) Quad meshes generated from our
CDF design method before and after planarization. (d) A quad
mesh generated by the mixed-integer method [Bommes et al. 2009]
using a 4-RoSy field. (e) The planarization result of (d). (f) A dense
sampling of the quad mesh in (d).
eter lines. It characterizes a family of conjugate curve networks,
since the u parameter lines are ruling directions on the cylinder. In
this case, all the quads are exactly planar. On the right, the family
of parameter lines are defined by the parametrization gγ (u, v) =
(cos(u cos γ − v sin γ), sin(u cos γ − v sin γ), u cos γ + v sin γ).
They are orthogonal curve networks, i.e., 4-RoSy. However when
(γ mod π) 6= 0, all the quads from the orthogonal network are
not planar.
Since the initial quad mesh from a 4-RoSy field might be far from
planar, it can lead to a wrong local minimum in planarity optimization. Figure 10 illustrates an experimental verification of this situation. In Figure 10a, on a half ellipsoid model, a drawn stroke away
from the principal curvature direction is specified to guide the generation of a PQ mesh. The meshes in Figure 10b and Figure 10d are
generated by our CDF method and a 4-RoSy field before planarization respectively. Although they have a similar number of faces,
the planarity measure of our CDF result is one-order smaller since
the orientation of quads are very different. We also compare the
ζ = 0.004
δ = 26.11◦
δ = 4.20◦
η = 0.284
η = 0.173
(a)
δ = 0.18◦
η = 0.311
η = 0.022
(c)
ζ = 0.006
ζ = 0.002
δ = 0.08◦
δ = 0.05◦
η = 0.024
η = 0.023
(b)
(d)
Figure 11: Comparison between PQ meshes from a 4-RoSy field
and a CDF. (a&b) Quad meshes generated from a 4-RoSy field before and after planarization. (c&d) Quad meshes generated from
our CDF before and after planarization.
qualities after planarity optimization. The mesh generated by our
method can be perturbed slightly to be exactly planar. In contrast, a
large distortion must be introduced to the quad mesh from 4-RoSy
to improve its planarity since its parameter lines are far from conjugate. This validates the necessity of our CDF design method in PQ
mesh generation. An alternative way to achieve similar planarity is
to subdivide the mesh densely (see Figure 10e). However, increasing the number of faces is not desirable in architecture modeling,
since it increases the fabrication cost significantly.
Figure 11 illustrates a comparison between a CDF and a 4-RoSy
field in PQ mesh generation for the airport terminal model. Both
fields are generated from the same set of user-specified strokes as
shown in Figure 3. Since the conjugacy condition is not considered
in the 4-RoSy field, the generated 4-RoSy field is far from conjugate
although it contains fewer singularities (8 in total) than our CDF (24
in total). To achieve better planarity, the approximation quality is
sacrificed (the bumps on the top are flattened in Figure 11-left). In
contrast, the PQ mesh from our CDF design algorithm can approximate the original model faithfully.
A further validation of the advantage of CDF in PQ meshing is illustrated in Fig. 12. Comparing to the PQ mesh from CDF for the
bunny model in Fig. 8b, the PQ mesh from the 4-RoSy field contains the distorted quads at the foot of the bunny model. The reason
is that the 4-RoSy field cannot satisfy the conjugacy condition especially at high curvature regions. Therefore, the quad faces on these
regions might be distorted with high probability after the planarization step (see Fig. 12b).
7
δ = 49.8◦
Discussion and Limitations
It is worth to mention that the usage of our method is not limited
to architecture geometry. By removing the restriction of conjugacy
and noticing that the conjugacy condition is not involved explicitly
or implicitly in the smoothness measure in Section 3.1, our CDF is
actually a general cross field where the angle does not need to be 90
degrees, so it may find applications in interactive modeling [Chen
et al. 2008] and quad mesh generation [Bommes et al. 2010] to
align the field with geometry. We believe that our formulation of
the smoothness measure and index computation opens a door in designing a general cross field for more interesting computer graphics
(a)
(b)
Figure 12: Quad meshes for the Bunny model generated from a
4-RoSy field before (a) and after (b) planarization.
applications.
There are a few limitations of our method that should be addressed.
First, because of the nonlinearity of conjugacy, we cannot formulate the CDF optimization problem into a linear problem, which
is different from the linear approaches in RoSy field design, such
as the mixed integer approach in [Bommes et al. 2009] and the
trivial connection in [Crane et al. 2010]. A proper initialization
of the CDF must be provided for the success of the optimization.
Figure 13 shows that a random initialization would introduce more
singularities even after the CDF optimization. However, a random
initialization is not intended in practice and a proper initialization
has already been provided in Section 4.
The second limitation is the control of singularities. In our current
algorithm, we cannot define the singularities in the design phase and
a number of singularity editing operations is required for a complex
model. It would be interesting to investigate how to incorporate
the trivial connection approach into our CDF design for the user to
exactly control the locus of the singularities.
8
Conclusion and Future Work
By introducing a novel signed-permutation-based representation of
a smoothness measure for a CDF, we develop a general CDF design scheme in this paper. Since the vector association is treated
as a permutation operation in this representation, arbitrary types of
vector associations can be modeled to allow ±k/4 singularities in
a CDF. Furthermore the smoothness measure converts to a simple
summation of cosine functions that simplifies the computation and
results in an efficient direction field optimization algorithm.
In the future, we plan to integrate more functional properties into
our CDF design to reduce the panel cost by limiting the types
of quad faces [Fu et al. 2010] and to support the statics analysis
for practical architectural construction [Schiftner and Balzer 2010].
Other research directions include the extension of the CDF to planar hexagonal meshes which possess many useful offset properties
for fabrication [Pottmann et al. 2007b], and the study of discrete 3D
conjugate nets [Bobenko and Suris 2008] inside a bounded volume
for planar hexahedral mesh generation, where the planarity will improve the accuracy of linear hexahedral finite elements significantly.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Steve Lin for his careful proof-reading. The
Bunny model is obtained courtesy of the Stanford 3D Scanning
Repository. The airport, roof and tower model were created by
Xi Zhang. Falai Chen is partially supported by National Basic
G LYMPH , J., S HELDEN , D., C ECCATO , C., M USSEL , J., AND
S CHOBER , H. 2004. A parametric strategy for free-form glass
structures using quadrilateral planar facets. Automation in Construction 13, 187–202.
H ERTZMANN , A., AND Z ORIN , D. 2000. Illustrating smooth surfaces. In SIGGRAPH, 517–526.
Figure 13: Left: a CDF is initialized randomly with singularities
located at the red points. Middle: the optimized CDF by our method
which contains 64 singular points. Right: with an initialization using the propagation approach in Section 4, the number of singularities can be reduced to 8.
Research Program of China (2011CB302400), and NSF of China
(60873109, 11031007). Guoping Wang is partially supported by
National Basic Research Program of China (2010CB328002) and
NSF of China (60925007).
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